West German intelligence officer and former Nazi operative Alfred Benzinger is credited with coming up with the term in 1956 as a subtle yet invidious way to shift the focus of guilt away from his compatriots. Its since fallen into fairly common use, although often as a lazy slip of the tongue rather than an attempt to wound.

In 1956, a group of former Nazis working as West German intelligence agents coined terminology that arguably became the most viral — and longest lasting — propaganda born out of the former Hitler regime: “Polish death camps.”

Agency 114, filled with German former members of the Gestapo, SS and SD, was headed by former Nazis Secret Field Police (GFP) sergeant Alfred Benzinger, who is credited with the phrase.

Benzinger’s goal? To change public discourse and shift the blame for the Holocaust from Germans and Germany to Poland, where most of the Nazi regime’s mass extermination camps were located. And by the time of Benzinger’s propaganda attack, Poland was in the throes of such domestic turmoil that the wordage was hardly a priority.